Part of 1. 1. Questions to the Cabinet Secretary for Education – in the Senedd at 2:00 pm on 8 February 2017.
It’s good to hear that the Cabinet Secretary supports that flexibility. At the Children, Young People and Education Committee last week, the NUT said that PPA is a big issue in primary schools in particular. It was Neil Foden of NUT Cymru who said that schools were freeing teachers for the required 10 per cent of their teaching time and releasing them from their workloads, which is to be welcomed and a good thing. However, he also said that many schools are achieving this by using staff without qualified teacher status, such as classroom assistants or higher-level teaching assistants. This can mean—and this is what he said—that pupils are not being taught by a qualified teacher for the equivalent of one month in an academic year. We need to find a solution to this if that is the case. So, where there is a need, perhaps, to reduce teaching capacity in some schools, wouldn’t it be more appropriate to use that teaching capacity to cover PPA, perhaps as a floating teacher with responsibility for covering PPA, or find other creative solutions to this particular problem?